Electronic Proceedings of the Twenty-second Annual International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics

Chicago, Illinois, March 11-14, 2010

Paper S080

This is an electronic reprint, reproduced by permission of Pearson Education Inc. Originally appeared in the Proceedings of the Twenty-second Annual International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics, ISBN 978-0-321-74614-6, Copyright (C) 2011 by Pearson Education, Inc.

Robert Burks

The presentation uses technology (Excel, Maple) and dynamical system modeling of probabilistic behavior. This problem is important to counter-insurgency operations where force alone might not prevail - hence the need to better understand 'soft' operations (civil support, psychological operations). Modeling is done using a system of difference equations; several transmission distributions, including time-dependent distributions, are considered and discussed. We investigate several transmission distributions and use Excel to implement the model. This model and its implementation form the capstone project for a course in mathematical modeling using probability and statistics.